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Woodstock & Region

London tots’ rites renew call for ‘safe haven law’

They were four little people, three of them from London, who finally are being laid to rest.

Next week, the remains of four infants will be buried in Toronto in a ceremony to celebrate them and remind the provincial government there might be a way to save others.

Abuse Hurts, an advocacy group for children, is having a funeral for the four babies at the Elgin Mills Cemetery. They will be the eighth, nine, 10th and 11th children the agency has buried.

The Tuesday ceremony also will serve as a reminder to the provincial government to consider a “safe haven law” that would allow at-risk women to drop off their babies at hospitals with no questions asked.

A similar law enacted in the United States is believed to have helped save more than 2,000 children in 10 years.

John Muise, Abuse Hurts director of public safety, said it’s been difficult to get any political traction to get the law in place because it isn’t “a front-burner issue.”

“In light of the upcoming provincial election, we see it as an opportunity to get someone interested,” he said.

“It seems to me providing opportunity for a mom in crisis just to drop a baby in a safe, protected place, no questions asked, no concerns about police follow up, no concern about being identified because of whatever the reason is, to have that baby go through proper channels, we should be able to do that.”

The Ontario coroner’s office couldn’t give many details about the children because of privacy constraints. They could confirm that one child, a girl, was abandoned at a Toronto hospital and died on Christmas Day 2017.

The other three children were found at the same time in the same location in London. Their date of death is listed as June 8, 2009.

One of the children was a girl, but there was no way of identifying the sex of the other two bodies.

No explanation was given as to why it had taken eight years to bury their remains.

While the coroner wouldn’t divulge who the children were, there was a high-profile case in London in June 2009, involving the discovery of the remains of three babies at a London home.

A mother of four children, then 33, pleaded guilty to three counts of offering an indignity to a dead body and was sentenced to three years of probation.

She told the court the children were stillborn, and because she had no money to bury them, she named them and kept them with her in boxes while she moved frequently with her other children and an abusive partner.

The court was told she was afraid to seek prenatal care because of her husband’s ongoing abuse.

Autopsies showed the children had been dead for months, even years. There was no way of determining whether the children had been stillborn or born alive.

She maintained a strong bond with her living children, so much so that a report to the court from the Children’s Aid Society called her “an excellent mother” and supported her regaining full access to them.